I have to laugh whenever I see this snowglobe of Sigmund Freud, which is on a shelf in my campus office. This came to me from my old friend from graduate school, Bill Hamilton, who picked it up during a trip to Vienna last year, when he visited the Sigmund Freud Museum among other things.

What an odd choice for a kitschy ball of faux-snow! The figure inside is hard to determine as Freud, but I like to imagine it is Freud wearing ski goggles. Or a character from Futurama.

A colleague once asked me if that was cocaine swirling around his head.

The snowglobe is hilarious, as all snowglobes are.

The other day I took the above photo because the look of it got me thinking about snowglobes themselves — balls of glass that swirl powder in a watery shell to create a three-dimensional snowfall scenario. It’s impossible not to think of Citizen Kane or childhood or giftshops. To me they seem to imply a moment “frozen in time” — much like a photograph — yet not still… in persistent motion. The snowfall effect, when it works correctly, and sustains a well-balanced drift over time, aligns the device with the “automaton.” Yet we must shake them to stir them to life — these are not robots with on-off switches.

Indeed, the snowglobe is unerringly physical in nature…seemingly alive, in that it is a globular, fragile vessel that contains liquid, despite its hard glass shell. It is fascinating to watch people make this odd gesture — the shaking of a snowball — and to see the change that momentarily comes across their features — the frustration or fear or desire on their faces. Some shake them violently. Some gently disturb the glass for fear of dropping it. Some swish them like brandy; others twist them upside down and up again with violent abandon. There is something going on there, some kind of wish fulfillment and dread, in that strange moment when they grasp and disturb the contents of the globe, followed by the look of hope in their eyes as they hold it up to the light.

I always want the snow to keep moving, so I never have to shake the globe again. But gravity always wins.

The snowglobe is always reminiscent of death until it is shaken into life. In this way it has the aura of the uncanny.

It is no wonder, then, that they are objects of kitsch commodity fetishism in popular culture. Every gift shop sells them, even when the objects in the globe have absolutely nothing to do with snow, winter, or white powder in any way. Their “liveliness” promises for a price to allow you to magically bring a memory back to life, through this fetish object that stands in for the memory. We just think of them as toys, but they are deceptively more like dreams. Nay, they are more akin to crystal balls than toys.

“It is not a toy,” [VP of Marketing] Clarkson says, “but this is the closest you can get to real pet ownership without the hassles or responsibilities of owning a real pet.” — journalgazette.net

“In 2005, Perfect Petzzz® generated more than $20 million in retail sales in its first full year of operation. In fact, the Perfect Petzzz cart program was named the most successful new product concept in 2005. With the overwhelming demand for these lifelike puppies and kittens, we’ve seen other companies try to produce imitations.” — CD3 Press Release to PP Mall Dealers

Perfect Petzzz are stuffed animals that breathe. The autonomous movement of their fur — controlled by a battery-powered engine you don’t expect to be there — is enough to trick the eye into presuming that the puppy or kitten curled up on the floor is actually a living, breathing, pet. Cute, and perhaps attractive to your hand’s caress, until you touch it and realize it’s not real. Then you are startled and the toy enters the already doll-crowded realm of the popular uncanny.

Of course, the Perfect Petzzz (the ”zzz’s” are for snoring) are plastic. And therefore the animal it represents is literally as dead as it looks, with its eyes closed and body stiffened into a disturbing fetal curl. It should not move, but it does, and it is this representation of death-stirred-to-life — of the presumed inanimate object surprising us with its animation — that gets our reaction. The tricky switcheroo of statuses between familiar and unfamiliar spin the roulette wheel of certainty: the domesticated animal is rendered un-familiar (stuffed, inanimate) then restored to a heimish (cozy) status of sleeping and napping..

It is surely cute, and there is little difference between a breathing stuffed animal and a toy doll that burps or blinks. Of course, even the cutest of dolls are inherently uncanny in the way they are semblances, pale imitations of life…but the creepy thing in this case is not so much its status as automaton, as the fact that this “sleeper” never wakes up. These are comatose pets…and that, perhaps, is what makes them so “perfect.” Like the commodities these organic creatures have become, our domesticated pets are “perfect” when they are behaved, controlled, and easily replaceable after they expire. Even more, these plastic pals are simulacratic forms of taxidermy (and surely a savvy taxidermist has already borrowed the motor or at least the concept for an experiment or two). Another form of death, fantastically alive through the magic show of animism, nostalgia and fantasy. Living, breathing, death.

The photo above is a “personalized urn” that British firm Cremation Solutions can create, using 3-D facial reconstruction software. There is obviously an uncanny element to this urn, which reduces the body into ash stored into a simulacrum of one of its components — a dismembered head with a removable skullcap — in the form of an unblinking mannequin head whose features bare an alarming similarity to the dearly departed.

At first I was taken aback by the image, both because of the accuracy of the likeness and because of the unexpected treatment of a living person, as if he were already dead. As it sunk in, I realized that most presidential figures and celebrities — indeed, anyone whose image is popular — are memorialized in a similar fashion, having their images frozen into postage stamps and plaster busts — and so, conceptually, this tribute is not so aberrant. But the uncanny is still omnipresent in the unblinking return of the gaze, the doppelganger of the dead person permanently placed on your mantle. There’s a reason why graveyards spook us: they are the spaces where the dead “live”; cremation urns can respect the role of the dead in a loving family’s home, but the more lifelike the urn, the more uncanny it becomes, making the boundaries between life and death — subject and object — very blurry. The commercial marketing of such memorials, both loved ones and celebrities, sold “on demand” (just $2600 for an urn that can hold all the ashes; $600 for a smaller keepsake), integrating the unfamiliar “magic” of high technology with the domestic familiarity of family photographs, brings this into the realm of the popular uncanny.

I could go on and on about the stock elements of the unheimlich in these urns. But one thing this particular practice brings to mind is a rising cultural trend toward employing 3D image rendering in ways that clone or replicate us. The art world seems to be responding to this with great interest. Visit the WebDesigner’s Depot on “Mind-Blowing Hyperrealistic Sculptures” or Eric Testroete’s Papercraft Self-Portrait series to muse over the implications and potentials of all this technology. I suspect we’ll see many more “personalized” objects mapped off images of ourselves or popular images in the media — there’s no end to our sense of wonder about ourselves, but one has to also wonder where natural fascination ends and cultural narcissism begins.

Rob Horning‘s recent essay in PopMatters — called “Doomed to Dilettantism” — performs an alarming and fantastic excoriation of the trend toward substituting “professionalism” in the arts with “amateurism” by consumers. Ingeniously, Horning connects the proliferation of faux-artisan strip mall stores like Michael’s (the chain craft store “Where Creativity Happens”) to the consumerist propensity for instant art without work found in such manufactured-but-ultimately-empty products for purchase like Paint-by-Numbers kits and Guitar Hero. These are simulacra that pre-package the artistic process, transforming it into a consumer item, slowly depreciating the cultural value of art in the process.

Horning’s essay is important, I think, especially in the way he ties all of this in to the economy. His article is not so much a snubbing of folk art or a call for a return to the great divide between high art and lowbrow, as it is a lament about the erasure of meaningful production altogether under capitalism. He’s captured what is so pathetic about games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band — whose karaoke appeal (as I discovered over the holidays personally) is really quite fun, but whose faux instruments are irrationally consumerist and whose existence would seem unfathomable a decade ago. As Horning points out: for the same price of the kit needed for Rock Band, you can buy real musical equipment! Instead of creating art what happens is that players are trained to play along, buying more and more accessories (available in an infinite shopping mall that opens up via online access, with its downloadable songs and pricey plastic “instruments” and much, much more). While a game like Rock Band does involve players in a team and there is a joissance to be experienced that is not unlike group dance, the truth is that even the relationships between players is a faux social relationship. The players’ attentions are mediated by the TV screen which must be studied and followed like a script, rather than performing as a harmonious ensemble, riffing off the sounds created by one another. Indeed, you often have to ignore your fellow players’ mistakes if you hope to survive, and the only impromptu action you can take is lifting your guitar into the air to pretend that you’re doing a solo. Yet the pleasure of the game comes when everyone is working in uncanny synchronicity, timed with the pulsing lights — we win when become the stars on the screen by rote repetition of the programmed score, keeping the machine streaming prefab sounds in a steady and uninterrupted stream. Mechanical reproduction is the objective. It is, ultimately, the very antithesis of artistic production.

Horning argues that such an activity deifies consumption and that this sort of artistic paradigm transforms how we relate to artwork. We see it as a collectible, rather than an experience. The “aura” of the artist dissipates, replaced by the commodity fetish. We begin to value quantity over quality, in order to display and advertise our pop culture status, rather than genuinely appreciating what it is we’re collecting, or attempting to create anything of use or cultural value on our own. In the case of paint-by-numbers art, we have no time to develop the skills required to refine our talents; we have no desire to work for pleasure. In the process, the arts become a deskilled industry — just like the handcraft of furniture making is replaced by push-button factory labor — and we subsequently become bored and alienated by the arts, driven only to fill the void with more and more stuff as we throw away one thing (or momentarily give tribute to it in the collection) and move on to the next one. The result is ultimately ennui and a quest to stave it off with more consumer goods that ultimately leave us dissatisfied all over again.

In games like Rock Band and Guitar hero, we don’t create the music: the music creates us, and we recognize this in the uncanny avatars that refract back to us, screaming and pounding the skins on our TV screens.

Here in the USA, it’s Thanksgiving morning. The annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in NYC is just getting started, and while I’ve never been a fan of parades, one can’t deny their significance in both small town culture and in big city holiday fests, alike. The news media treat them like spectator sports. For the event in NYC, millions attend — and millions more watch on television.

The spectacle of the parade “float” has always amused me. There are many variations and technologies put into practice for these objects, from novelty floats to “balloonicles” — and many of them are fictional characters from animation history, appealing to children; chief among them are animal figures, simulacra of the actual animals which used to be carted down the street (ala circus parade). The aesthetic of “balloon animals” sends us back to our childhood, here returned larger than life and, often, animistically empowered.

Which is another way of saying that these moving platforms and inflated creatures don’t merely “parade” down the street: they spectrally float, seemingly on their own accord, and their creators do all they can to hide the mechanics that move them. Parade floats and balloons glide down main street, like stages built upon magic carpets or gigantic ghosts. The spectrality of the parade float is what lurks behind the laughable logic of the possessed Stay Puft Marshmallow Man (pictured above) who attacks Dan Ackroyd and crew in the horror-comedy, Ghostbusters (1984). Parades command attention because of the communal fascination with public spectacles, and the human feats of greatness (from celebrities to heroes to marching bands) compete against spectacles of technological wonder and art. Parade floats are in every way an exhibition of the popular uncanny.

In this advertisement, cartoon characters (Stewie Griffin and Underdog) virtually fistfight over a Coke bottle, careening against buildings and bouncing off one another in ways that look “realistic” — yet also impossibly conscious of what they are doing. It is a neat trick of camera work and choreography (even if one assumes CGI is involved, the trickery is pretty savvy), lending the floats a sense of autonomy in their motivated quest to beat each other to the prize: a bottle of coke. A more peaceful and happy Charlie Brown comes almost out of nowhere to steal the bottle away from the distracted pair, his permanent grin expressing his glee. In the final frame, the Charlie “has a Coke and a smile.”

There’s a lot more going on here than first meets the eye. For instance, the ad uses a lot of “reaction shots” of human beings looking up to the sky or out of their skyscraper windows, which makes the constructed scene appear to be “really happening” in the city. One might even miss, in all of these reaction shots, the inside joke to fans of the Peanuts comic: right before Charlie Brown wins the day, a little brown-haired girl walks in the city park, looking up to the sky while holding a football, as if she was Lucy (known for pulling the ball away from Charlie just as he kicked at it — sending him flying in the air and landing flat on his back. This joke doesn’t just give give Charlie his wings — it elides the difference between human and non-human, real and imaginary, in the few seconds it appears on air. Film, of course, does this anyway: actors are not “really” there before us, but trace images, recorded in light and rendered larger than life.

Even more puzzling: the Coke bottle itself, a float, a commodity as big as the characters who seek it. Clearly it is far too much to consume in reality — yet they are driven to drink it. Unlike the other balloon creatures, it does not act in human ways, but instead seems to function more like a symbol that is preordained to magically find its way to Charlie’s hands. That is, it is a transcendent signifier for the commodity itself that they all represent.

This is all fantasy, framed to pitch a product by processing cultural icons that include not only the floats, but also the “larger than life” setting of the city itself. There may be an uncanny echo of the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks operating in the political unconscious beneath this Coke advertisement. The “soft” bounce of these objects from childhood against skyscrapers may reflect a repressed fear of air attack on the city, here returned to the television screen as something akin to a childhood memory, a flight of animated fancy. The only people “threatened” by the horror of the giant balloons are those who aren’t paying attention to the spectacle in the streets, caught off guard. Perhaps I’m reading too much into the simple ad, but the imagery is striking.

The above image — appearing only for a second on the screen — seems to align Coke with the majesty of the city’s greatest icons. But it also implies so much more than that, especially given the context of “fighting” that it is embedded within. And in the image above, what are we to make of the clouds — the two lines like tracers of exhaust from two airplanes — arcing behind (or toward?) the Chrysler Building, while the shot as a whole is uncannily framed by two other “twin tower”-like buildings? I think it is patently obvious that this image is about fear as much as it is about fantasy.

One must wonder what the narrative of this ad might be saying about consumerism in relation to such cultural anxieties as global terrorism. Does it suggest something about competition, world trade, and terrorism? Is America the Charlie Brown, fooled by so many Lucies, so many wars? I’m not sure what it means, exactly, but I think there is some bottled up anxiety in this advertisement, felt as uncanny when it is uncapped and released.

On the Uncanny . . .

It is only this factor of involuntary repetition which surrounds what would otherwise be innocent enough with an uncanny atmosphere, and forces upon us the idea of something fateful and inescapable when otherwise we should have spoken only of ‘chance’…We do feel this to be uncanny. And unless a man is utterly hardened and proof against the lure of superstition, he will be tempted to ascribe a secret meaning to this obstinate recurrence of a number; he will take it, perhaps, as an indication of the span of life allotted to him.